My colleague flew back to our firebase and returned to his desk. He continued to track Bergdahl, cursing him all the while. Bergdahl became the idol of his discontent also. His Jonah.
* * *
During my eight-year military career, I only met one deserter. It was early in 2003, and I was fresh out of college, a newly minted second lieutenant on my way to Iraq. At Marine Corps Base Quantico, where I underwent training, we had to get decals for our cars from the provost marshall’s office, the base cops. Behind a counter, stamping an endless ream of forms, stood a man in his early sixties. He was silver-haired, with a ruddy alcoholic’s complexion. He wore the same MARPAT camouflage utilities as me, but his shirt’s tapered cut bulged where age ran his stomach to fat. On his collar, he wore no rank. He was a private. As he stamped my form, I couldn’t stop looking at him. He didn’t seem to mind. I’m sure I wasn’t the first. We exchanged pleasantries. I can’t remember much of what we said, but I remember when he called me “Sir.” The way he smiled when he said it.
Later I learned that the sixty-year-old private deserted during the Vietnam War. He’d gone to Canada and reentered the country some years later. In 1977, on his first day in office, President Carter pardoned those who avoided the draft as well as military deserters who had not yet been convicted or punished, but individuals were still required to apply for clemency. During the Iraq War, the Marine Corps had opened dozens of long-cold desertion cases, sending a message to my generation as it headed to war. The old private I met had seen this renewed effort and turned himself in. Offered a brief stint in the brig and a fine, he finished out his enlistment instead.
And that’s what I remember about his smile: he seemed to recognize both the sanctity and absurdity of his choice.
* * *
Among veterans of the Afghanistan War, Bergdahl’s return unleashes a torrent of emotion, much of it vitriolic. For many, he continues to be an idol of discontent, the Jonah of our Afghan voyage. For others, he’s a different type of idol, the POW brought home with a hero’s trappings. In a conflict that eschews war’s traditional definitions of front lines, combatants, and armies, it’s difficult to define what he has become. Over five years of captivity, Bowe Bergdahl was, more than anything else, a symbol, used by many: his former comrades, the Taliban, and the White House, which revealed the details of the prisoner swap a few days after President Obama’s speech announcing a 2016 withdrawal from Afghanistan, a deadline that would soon lapse like the many set before it.
After the announcement of Bergdahl’s release, a former soldier from his squad in Blackfoot Company immediately sends out his recollections of the disappearance in more than one hundred tweets. He concludes by writing: “So without B going missing we wouldn’t have been in certain places. And without being in those places, 2 brothers wouldn’t have given the ultimate sacrifice. They went out like fucking Hero’s.” A few tweets later, referring to his nondisclosure agreement, he writes: “Anybody got a lawyer btw?”
The night the news breaks, Nate and I speak for nearly three hours. Just before we hang up, he puts it more succinctly: “He’s back and my friends are still dead.”
The only clear thing in any of this is the suffering. For five years, Bergdahl suffered as an idol. The soldiers sent to recover that idol suffered too. Each was affected by Bergdahl’s disappearance, and each will decide whether he wishes to forgive Bergdahl—or whether he will continue to be their Jonah.
That story had its end also. After being thrown overboard by his shipmates and swallowed by the whale, Jonah prayed to God:
When my soul fainted within me
I remembered the Lord. . . .
Those who regard worthless idols
forsake their own mercy. . . .
So the Lord spoke to the fish, and it vomited Jonah onto dry land.
THE SULEIMANI PHOTOGRAPH
AMIRLI
I wonder if Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi reads Mao?
This is what I am thinking as I sit in my Istanbul flat when the first news of a blitzkrieg next door in northern Iraq comes across the wires. It is late June and the streets are lazy with heat. The Turks have emptied their city, abandoning it to the advance of sweltering temperatures. In Haditha, Samarra, Tikrit, the Iraqi residents abandon their cities as well. After a handful of days, the Islamic State seizes the Mosul Dam. They threaten thousands of Yezidi families with extermination in the Sinjar Mountains. They are poised just outside the Kurdish capital of Erbil. It seems as if al-Baghdadi has ripped a page out of Mao’s classic 1937 treatise On Guerrilla Warfare.
Mao Zedong wrote the book at the outset of the Second Sino-Japanese War, when Japan invaded the Chinese mainland. It was an argument for a new type of struggle, one that he and the Chinese Communists successfully waged for the next eight years. It lays out what has since become widely accepted as the three-phase Maoist model, the sine qua non of an effective insurgency.
In phase one, the guerrillas earn the population’s support by distributing propaganda and attacking the organs of government. In phase two, escalating attacks are launched against the government’s military forces and vital institutions. And in phase three, conventional warfare and fighting are used to seize cities, overthrow the government, and assume control of the country.
The Islamic State’s advance leaves America’s military and political leaders reeling, even though we are quite familiar with the three-phase Maoist model—it was used to great effect against us over the course of the Vietnam War. Ho Chi Minh adhered to this strategy, and even after he took ill in 1960 and died in 1969, his successor, Lê Duẩn, followed it, culminating in the 1975 Spring Offensive, when columns of North Vietnamese regulars, riding in Chinese-made tanks, invaded South Vietnam, leading to the eventual fall of Saigon.
During a summer of offensives and counteroffensives, the Islamic State’s columns of captured American Humvees and tanks pace the desert in a war of maneuver. This language of advance and retreat, ground seized, sieges laid, bears closer resemblance to the Second World War than the quagmire of Iraq’s long-running insurgency. Among America’s leadership, confusion sets in. President Obama appears on television and, ridiculed for wearing a khaki summer suit, as if he didn’t plan to face the cameras that day, concedes that his administration does not yet have a strategy to combat the Islamic State. He calls them “terrorists.” No doubt their tactics have been barbaric—mass executions, the beheading of journalists during this same summer—but words matter, and to refer to them simply as terrorists negates their very serious political goals.
The West continues to refer to the Islamic State as ISIL or ISIS, refusing to align its vision of these radicals with the vision they hold of themselves: as a state. Does refusing to acknowledge their vision help us defeat the Islamic State? A less than nuanced understanding of the adversary was one of our great strategic blunders during Vietnam. While American policy makers spoke about “domino theory” and “rolling back communism,” their North Vietnamese counterparts spoke largely in terms of national unity and a long history of intervention and oppression by foreign powers—the Chinese included, despite Mao’s intellectual influence on Ho Chi Minh.
July swelters on as an ever-expanding inkblot of Islamic State conquests spreads across the Iraqi provinces of al-Anbar, Nineveh, others. Erbil remains under threat, with fighting in its suburbs of Makmour and Gwer. Both towns fall but are retaken by Kurdish peshmerga fighters, whose name translates as “those who face death.” And the unthinkable—that Baghdad could fall—seems possible. Both American and Iranian advisers flood into that city, for it’s not hard to imagine that the Islamic State’s summer offensive of 2014 could be similar in scope to North Vietnam’s spring offensive of 1975. It seems phase three of Mao’s treatise, conventional warfare, is well underway.
As for phases one and two, those were the American war in Iraq.
Even back when Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was leading al-Qaeda
in Mesopotamia nearly a decade ago, the organization’s aim was the establishment of an Islamic state. Its courtship of Sunni tribal leaders and ex-Ba’athists in the wake of the American-led invasion adhered to Mao’s idea of phase one operations, and the full-scale insurgency beginning in 2004 also fit within the Maoist construct of phase two operations.
So maybe Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi (or Caliph Ibrahim) is reading On Guerrilla Warfare, or maybe he’s not, but what seems clear is that he’s got a strategy, one adhering to a method that has worked in the past, one that’s facilitated the founding of nations, regardless of whether those nations conform to international norms of human rights and basic decency.
The American response grows: an airdrop of humanitarian supplies to the trapped Yezidis in the Sinjar Mountains, limited air strikes that expand as limited air strikes always do, and military advisers. We return to war as we promise we are not returning to war. By August, President Obama announces to the country, “As commander in chief, I will not allow the United States to be dragged into fighting another war in Iraq. And so even as we support Iraqis as they take the fight to these terrorists, American combat troops will not be returning to fight in Iraq.”
Define combat troops? The pilots on their bombing runs are not combat troops. The military advisers embedded within the crumbling Iraqi Army are not combat troops. Who will do the fighting? A strange alliance begins to coalesce, old adversaries forced into coalition. They will fight the Islamic State in a place called Amirli.
* * *
Wars often end with an iconic image: Lee and Grant at Appomattox Court House, the Japanese surrendering aboard the USS Missouri, a helicopter lifting off the CIA station’s roof in Saigon. Over the summer, images begin to trickle out of Amirli, a town of twenty thousand Shiite-Turkmen in Saladin Province. Machine-gun-wielding militiamen. Columns of smoke curling among palm groves. Homes crushed to dust in streets of dust. On my phone, on my laptop, there is no shortage of such images. As I wonder if one might signal the end of the Iraq War, I find myself looking at the photo that marked its beginning, for me.
The picture that I have from the war’s beginning was taken in late May 2003, on the day I was commissioned as a second lieutenant. It shows me with my friend and mentor Douglas Zembiec, the Marine major who ran my special operations training. The two of us are in Boston, on the deck of the USS Constitution, the oldest commissioned warship in the US Navy. Standing between the masts, we wear our dress blues, with their antiquated high collars and brass buttons. Doug has just pinned my bars on my epaulettes. We’re both smiling. I look proud, and he proud of me.
The photo was taken about three weeks after President Bush’s “Mission Accomplished” speech. We’d missed the opening salvos of the invasion, but within eighteen months Doug would fight in the First Battle of Fallujah and I would fight in the Second. Both of us would be wounded. Doug was decorated for his valor, and a much-circulated profile of him ran in the Los Angeles Times, headlined “The Unapologetic Warrior.” When he was asked about the intense fighting he’d seen in April 2004, he replied with characteristic bombast: “I’ve told [my troops] that killing is not wrong if it’s for a purpose, if it’s to keep your nation free or to protect your buddy. One of the most noble things you can do is kill the enemy.” Doug was always saying unfashionable things like that, and he believed them. I’d anchored myself in his mentorship because of his unshakable faith in being a Marine. The years of combat to follow made more sense when you held on to those kinds of precepts, when they felt true.
Doug returned from Iraq to Camp Pendleton, California, that fall. While he was home, his first child, a daughter, was born. He was eventually detailed to CIA, which deployed him to Baghdad as an adviser to an Iraqi counterterrorism unit. The Quds Force, a special forces unit of Iran’s elite Revolutionary Guards, was extremely active in Iraq at the time, providing guidance and equipment to the Shiite insurgency there. The head of the Quds Force, General Qassem Suleimani, was orchestrating a proxy war against the US and Iraqi governments using several Shiite militias as surrogates.
On the night of May 11, 2007, Doug led an Iraqi squad on a raid against the Mahdi Army, a Shiite militia operating in Sadr City. As he rushed down an alley, with several soldiers behind him, he was hit by a burst of machine gun fire beneath the eye and instantly killed. The Iraqi soldiers evacuated his body, calling over the radio, “Five wounded and one martyred.”
The word martyred implies sacrifice for a purpose. It recalls for me Doug’s words in the Los Angeles Times. Accounts from that night describe Doug spotting militia fighters as they set up a machine gun, then pushing several of his men out of the way, saving their lives. For years, when I remembered Doug, this act had seemed purpose enough, and the Marine Corps revered him for the sacrifice too. His funeral, at the Naval Academy Chapel, in Annapolis, was Homeric in scale, and the Corps named buildings and awards after him. At Baghdad International Airport, in 2008, General David Petraeus, the commander of coalition forces in Iraq at the time, dedicated a helicopter landing zone in his honor.
I’ve often felt the urge, looking at the picture of the two of us from 2003, to pair it with another one, as if to bookend the war and that period of my life. If, during this time when wars seem to lack a defined end, I could not have a Lee at Appomattox or a surrender on the deck of a battleship, perhaps I might make a separate peace. Then in August, scrolling through images coming from Amirli, I find the photo I am after.
For six weeks, with food, water, and medical supplies dwindling, and armed with little more than rifles, Amirli’s Shiite Turkmen have held out against the Islamic State. A relief force has fought in three directions to reach them: the Iraqi Army from the south, Kurdish peshmerga from the north, and Shiite militiamen, to include Iranian-backed militias, such as the Badr Corps and Asa’ib Ahl al-Haq along with Quds Force advisers, from the east. The aircraft of two nations fly overhead: Iranian surveillance drones and American close air support and humanitarian aid sorties. The picture I find, which appears to have been first posted online by Digital Resistance, an alternative news website, was taken on the outskirts of Amirli. In the center of the frame, wearing brown trousers, a beige baseball cap, and a keffiyeh, stands a man I recognize as General Suleimani, the head of the Quds Force. He isn’t quite smiling, but he looks pleased. Flanking him is an unidentified Iraqi soldier wearing a green T-shirt with “ARMY” printed on it and carrying an American-issue M4 carbine slung across his chest. With their Iranian advisers and matériel, and with the surveillance drones launched from Baghdad International Airport, the Shiite militias had achieved a significant victory in Amirli.
When I look at the photo, I can’t help but think that Suleimani would recognize the irony that his victory was due in part to the very US air power that his surrogates had once dodged in Sadr City, where Doug was killed. I doubt he would be aware of a further irony: that his surveillance drones were taking off right next to Zembiec Landing Zone. Given that wars are no longer punctuated by clear declarations of victory or defeat, the photo seems an appropriate bookend, concluding one memory of Iraq so that another might begin.
SAFE ON THE SOUTHBANK
LONDON
The same summer as Amirli, on the way back to the United States for a visit, I pass through London, where I grew up. I often find an excuse to return, for unimportant reasons, just to wander the city when I get the chance. It’s a habit that began after I’d finished my first tour in Iraq, when after the Fallujah battle my parents offered to treat me to a vacation as a Christmas gift, anywhere I wanted to go. When I said London, they seemed a bit surprised. Why not choose a more exotic destination, one that was less familiar to me? I told them that after seven months in the desert, I wanted to be somewhere cold and wet. At the time this made sense, but a decade later I’ve realized I wanted to return for a different reason: Southbank.
When I was nine, we packed up our home in Los Angeles and arrived at Heathrow on a gray Janu
ary morning. My financier father had taken a job running his firm’s London office. My mother, a novelist, quickly settled into the city’s vibrant literary scene. My brother, a gifted mathematician at only eleven, skipped a grade, excelling in our new school. But without my beloved beaches and endless blue-sky days, I floundered. Until I made a discovery.
Southbank, at an eastern bend in the Thames, is the epicenter of British skateboarding. Sheltered from London’s incessant rain by an undercroft, the space has stairs, ledges, and a large, smoothly paved expanse that sweeps into a three-sided bank. Graffiti artists worked there unmolested, homeless people slept in the corners, the sidewalk smelled faintly of urine, and the continuous crashing of skateboards left your head ringing. I loved it.
I soon made friends with the local skaters: Big Clive, a Jamaican kid from Brixton; Toby Shuall, the son of an Israeli jeweler; James “Paddy” Neasdon, whose uncle may have been in the IRA. I became “Fat Yank”—the lean Marine with the buzz cut coming later. We spoke our own language. Skateboarding tricks: backside tailslide, varial kickflip. Girls: She’s a total Bettie. Put-downs: Don’t be a T-Dog, land the trick. And my favorite: safe.
Safe meant “cool.” It meant “hello.” It meant “don’t worry about it.” Once, when trying a certain trick on the beam, a long wooden ledge topped with shards of granite, I toppled onto the stones, damaging a nerve in my hand—my right index finger still tingles when it’s cold out—and Toby came over, helping me up. “Safe, man. Safe.” A few minutes later, when I landed the trick, my friends banged their boards on the ground, shouting, “Safe! Safe! Safe!” And that’s what mattered—landing tricks, being a good skater.
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